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Winfrey on OWN: ‘Had I Known It Was This Difficult, I Might Have Done Something Else’

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Winfrey on OWN: ‘Had I Known It Was This Difficult, I Might Have Done Something Else’

By Brian Stelter April 2, 2012 9:51 amApril 2, 2012 9:51 am

Oprah Winfrey said Monday that had she known how difficult it would be to start OWN, her one-year-old cable channel, she might not have tried to start it at all.

That candid admission came Monday on “CBS This Morning,” the morning news show co-hosted by Ms. Winfrey’s best friend, Gayle King. In an interview with Ms. King and Charlie Rose, Ms. Winfrey said that if she were writing a book about the experience to date, she could call it “101 Mistakes.”

OWN has been plagued by low ratings and overly high expectations since it was started in January 2011, five months before Ms. Winfrey ended her popular daytime talk show to concentrate on the channel.

“The idea of creating a network was something that I’d wanted to do” for a long time, Ms. Winfrey said. “Had I known that it was this difficult, I might have done something else.”

That comment surprised Mr. Rose, who asked, “Really? If you knew that it was going to be this difficult, you might have not done it?”

“Oh, absolutely,” she answered.

She faulted OWN — which is a joint venture of her production company and Discovery Communications — for “launching when we really weren’t ready to launch.” She said, “It’s like having the wedding when you know you’re not ready, and you’re walking down the aisle, and you’re saying, ‘I don’t know if we should be walking down the aisle, maybe we should have postponed this.'”
“But,” Ms. King interjected, “the invitations are out.”

“But the invitations are out, so we have to go ahead,” Ms. Winfrey said.

In retrospect, Ms. Winfrey said, she probably would have waited to start OWN until after “The Oprah Winfrey Show” ended.

She admitted that some of the negative media coverage of the channel has stung, and said that she thought “last week” about quitting.

“Well I thought that last week. I thought that last week, with all the negative press.” But, she said, “it’s just press. It’s just press. It’s just press.” (OWN had been in the headlines for laying off 30 people, which Ms. Winfrey said was the most painful moment in the channel’s history to date.)

Then she pivoted for a moment to deliver a live-your-best-life lesson. “Because you failed at something — which, we haven’t failed,” she said, looking at the camera briefly — “but because you failed, does not make you a failure. And when you know that in the core of yourself, you can keep trying, or you can use whatever is happening in that moment to say, ‘Maybe I need to move in a new direction.'”

She indicated that at OWN, she will keep trying. The strategy now, she said, “is to do what we should have done from the beginning. And that is to build one show, one hour, one night at a time, and then move to the next night.”

Right now Sunday nights are the focus, because they feature new episodes of “Oprah’s Next Chapter,” the weekly interview program by Ms. Winfrey that effectively replaced “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

Ms. Winfrey appeared not to agree with Mr. Rose’s assessment — widely shared within the television industry — that what viewers want to see is “more Oprah, more Oprah, more Oprah, more Oprah.”

“Well, we had a great Saturday night,” she said, alluding to a night when OWN had reality shows that didn’t relate directly to Ms. Winfrey. “I said from the beginning, this channel can’t be based upon me. It has to be based on my philosophy and my ideas.”